Michael,
thanks for the response. i've made it further in the last 15 minutes (with your help) than i previously made in the last 24 hours.
i ran into a new problem though,,,,,, i'm trying to recover 1 single mailbox, or even just the top information store. it will restore between 300 and 350 megabytes, then give me this error
"The job failed with the following error: A communications failure has occurred."
that's the only info it gives me. after that happens i have to restart the BE services.
BackupExec, Exchange, Active Directory, and the backup file are all on the same physical and logical volume.